Dive Brief:

• Educators such as Kimberly Crowley, a mathematics supervisor for the Jersey City (NJ) Public Schools are finding drones to be an extremely useful tool to illustrate real-world examples tied to mathematical concepts, according to EdTech: Focus on K-12.
• The lessons have extended across grade levels, with kindergarteners watching drones land on a series of numbers placed on the classroom floor and 8th graders seeing a drone's flight path outlined across the floor using an attached piece of chalk to illustrate how quadratic equations work.
• Philadelphia's Avonworth School District has also found drones useful in coding lessons where students write programs to control the machines' flight.

Dive Insight:

Tech tools like drones provide great opportunities for schools and districts that can afford them to tie concepts learned in the classroom to the real world. It's one thing to read about a concept or to solve a formula on paper, but seeing that concept in action can be critical to connecting the dots.

This can be further accomplished through partnerships with local businesses and community organizations, who can provide professionals to help contextualize how combustion makes a car's engine work, the physics of how an object stays in flight, or basic business practices.

Not only can this approach help students understand how what they're learning about is used in the adult world, but it can help spark interest in future career fields they might pursue.